Tootfinder

ICE agent charged with two felonies
for allegedly pointing his gun at MN motorists during Operation Metro Surge
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said a "nationwide warrant" has been issued
in 💥 the first criminal charges against an ICE agent for on-duty actions during the surge.

"When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses. which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you’re playing a cartoon character."
—Willem Dafoe
#acting #coaching

Now here is something designed to shake confidence:
Flying, unmanned warships controlled by an on-board, but distributed, AI...
"Airbus is Preparing 2 Uncrewed Combat Aircraft from Kratos for 1st Flight With a European Mission System'"
…

Airbus is Preparing 2 Uncrewed Combat Aircraft from Kratos for 1st Flight With a European Mission System
Airbus is working at full throttle to offer the German Air Force an operational Uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (UCCA) system by 2029

To be clear, this is #ICE killing another person. They way they terrorize and disappear people, it is only natural to run from them.
"Ellis also pointed out that local law enforcement agencies in Chatham County have restrictive chase policies, and would not have been able to take the action ICE did."
"CCPD Chief Jeff Hadley offered his condolences to Davis’ family, say…

Savannah teacher killed in crash by man fleeing from ICE
According to the Chatham County Police Department, Monday morning’s fatal crash was the result of a chase between Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a suspect.

just dislodged a memory of attending the original 2002 auction of jerry garcia's guitars, at studio 54 for some reason, & guitar maker doug irwin (who garcia willed them to) literally cackling/laughing from the back of the room when tiger went for almost a million.

NFL Draft prospect Rueben Bain Jr. involved in fatal car accident in 2024, per report

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-draft-prospect-rueben-bain-jr-fatal-car-accident/

As with Putin's Russia, a successful Ukraine throws Russian failings into relief, so with the US Europe...
Why Maga loathes London - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/2ebeee78-0c53-4bb0-af04-c901718685e9 via @FT

So to follow up on this, I've caught it in action. Models, when quantized a bit, just do a bit more poorly with short contexts. Even going from f32 (as trained) to bf16 (as usually run) to q8 tends to do okay for "normal" context windows. And q4 you start feeling like "this model is a little stupid and gets stuck sometimes” (it is! It's just that it's still mostly careening about in the space of "plausible" most of the time. Not good guesswork, but still in the zone). With long contexts, the probability of parameters collapsing to zero are higher, so the more context the more likelihood you are to see brokenness.
And then at Q2 (2 bits per parameter) or Q1, the model falls apart completely. Parameters collapse to zero easily. You start seeing "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” sorts of behavior, with intense and unscrutinized repetition, followed by a hard stop when it just stops working.
And quantization is a parameter that a model vendor can turn relatively easily. (they have to regenerate the model from the base with more quantization, but it's a data transformation on the order of running a terabyte through a straightforward and fast process, not like training).
If you have 1000 customers and enough equipment to handle the requests of 700, going from bf16 to q8 is a no-brainer. Suddenly you can handle the load and have a little spare capacity. They get worse results, probably pay the same per token (or they're on a subscription that hides the cost anyway so you are even freer to make trade-offs. There's a reason that subscription products are kinda poorly described.)
It's also possible for them to vary this across a day: use models during quieter periods? Maybe you get an instance running a bf16 quantization. If you use it during a high use period? You get a Q4 model.
Or intelligent routing is possible. No idea if anyone is doing this, but if they monitor what you send a bit, and you generally shoot for an expensive model for simple requests? They could totally substitute a highly quantized version of the model to answer the question.
There are •so many tricks• that can be pulled here. Some of them very reasonable to make, some of them treading into outright misleading or fraudulent, and it's weirdly hard to draw the line between them.

"When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses. which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you’re playing a cartoon character."
—Willem Dafoe
#acting #coaching